Ombudsman’s credibility strains under questioning

COLLUSION, CROWN FORCES AND THEIR AGENTS | MURDER OF CITIZENS AT THE HEART OF BRITISH POLICY IN IRELAND

Police Ombudsman Al Hutchinson

» BY PEADAR WHELAN

IF AL HUTCHINSON, the North’s Police Ombudsman, were a boxer involved in a bout, his corner would be on the point of throwing in the towel.
Hutchinson has taken so many hits in the past year that it’s hard to believe he is still on his feet.
The credibility that the Ombudsman’s office built up during the tenure of Nuala O’Loan has all but disappeared under Al Hutchinson, her successor.
His judgment was seriously questioned last summer when his initial report into the UVF bombing of McGurk’s Bar in north Belfast in 1971 so angered the families of the dead that Hutchinson had to pull it.
The families described his findings as “flawed and unforgivable.
In that “flawed” report, Hutchinson effectively cleared the RUC over its failure to properly investigate the 1971 attack that left 15 Catholics dead.
But the chickens have really come home to roost for Hutchinson in the past month, particularly over his report into the UVF killings of six Catholic men in The Heights Bar, Louginisland, County Down, in June 1994 as they watched Ireland’s World Cup match against Italy.
In his findings into the ‘Loughinisland Massacre’, released on June 24th, he asserted there was no evidence of links between the RUC and the UVF killers.
Hutchinson’s assertion was described by the solicitor representing all six families as “factual gymnastics to rewrite the definition of collusion”. The solicitor, Niall Murphy, went on to say:
“The fact that Special Branch does not appear in the report is an insult to the intelligence of the families.”
The families went on to say Hutchinson, “redefined the definition of collusion” and described the report as a “whitewash” and an “insult”.
Unfortunately for Hutchinson and the Ombudsman’s Office, the human rights watchdog, Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), had, in the week before the publication of the Loughinisland Report, released their own report, similarly accusing the Ombudsman of redefining collusion.
The Policing Programme Officer at CAJ, Mick Beyers, says:
“Our research has raised serious concerns in relation to the failure of the office to define collusion and apply the term ‘collusion’ in a consistent manner across all investigations and a failure to hold the police to account in relation to historic cases.”
According to Beyers:
“CAJ began its analysis of the Ombudsman last summer following growing unease amongst families, victims, legal representatives and human rights groups about the approach of the Police Ombudsman’s Office to historic cases.”
This has left the CAJ asking whether or nor the Police Ombudsman Office is ‘fit for purpose’ as a separate investigation looking into whether or not the NIO interfered in the appointment of Al Hutchinson is underway.
CAJ Director Mike Ritchie, speaking after the release of the CAJ report on June 16th, ‘Human Rights and Dealing with Historic Cases - A Review of the Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland’, said:
“There are serious questions about the operation of the Ombudsman’s office.”
The report had “discovered irregularities” in the process of appointing the post of Police Ombudsman, he claimed.
“Worryingly, CAJ uncovered a range of irregularities in relation to the appointment process of the current Police Ombudsman, overseen by the NIO, which we believe have had a significant impact on the independence of, and interference in, the office of the Police Ombudsman.”
Running in tandem with the CAJ report is that of Tony McCusker, the Chair of the Community Relations Council, who was called in to investigate claims by Sam Pollock, who resigned in April this year as Chief Executive of the Ombudsman’s office alleging that his work was being undermined by senior civil servants.
McCusker’s report, carried out for the Department of Justice and completed in May, has yet to be released.
A spokesperson for Justice Minister David Ford said:
“The department received the report but Mr McCusker asked for it to be factually checked and that is ongoing at the minute.”
From the perspective of the nationalist community, the common thread running through the present narrative is the seeming attempt by the Police Ombudsman to redefine collusion.
Former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens, who investigated links between the crown forces and loyalist death squads, characterised collusion as, “wilful failure to keep records, the absence of accountability, the withholding of intelligence and evidence, through to the extremes of agents being involved in murder”.
Retired Canadian Judge Peter Cory, who was appointed in 2002 by both the London and Dublin governments to investigate a number of cases involving allegations of collusion, advocated a “reasonably broad” definition.
He thus recommended:
“Police forces must not act collusively by ignoring or turning a blind eye to the wrongful acts of their servants or agents or by supplying information to assist others in committing wrongful acts or by encouraging them to commit wrongful acts.
“Any lesser definition would have the effect of condoning, or even encouraging, state involvement in crimes, thereby shattering all public confidence in these important agencies.” [Report’s emphasis.]
One legal representative interviewed by the CAJ believes that this lack of definitional clarity means:
“The Police Ombudsman’s office is, perhaps on a policy level, restricted from making a proactive conclusion that the police have colluded with loyalist murder gangs, even in circumstances where the evidence points to that inevitable conclusion.”
Setting these definitions of collusion against the Ombudsman’s findings in the Loughinisland attack, then it seems the only conclusion that any observer can reach is that the crown forces did collude with the UVF killers.
The Ombudsman found the following failings in the original RUC investigation:-

•    Records are missing and no DNA was retained in relation to all suspects arrested in connection with the attack;
•    A getaway car, recovered in the aftermath of the attack, was destroyed by police 10 months later and police did not carry out forensic examination of the area where the car was found;
•    Failings in the management of the murder inquiry system which may have resulted in the loss of evidential opportunities;
•    None of the original notes made during interviews of suspects between 1994/5 were recovered by the Ombudsman. (Instead, the office was told they were destroyed in 1998 after becoming contaminated with asbestos at Gough RUC Barracks!);
•    Police failed to investigate the link between the Loughinisland shootings and other attacks.

In the face of the families’ angry reaction, that these cumulative failings do not amount to collusion, Hutchinson defends his report asking: Was it deliberate? Does it stack up against the definition of collusion?
‘No,’ he says.
So which definition of collusion does the Police Ombudsman use, especially as his predecessor Nuala O’Loan was inclined to use those definitions outlined by Lord Stevens and Judge Peter Cory?
In Section 6.45 of his report the Ombudsman writes:
“In previous reports, the Police Ombudsman has noted that the term ‘collusion’ is ill-defined, without a single accepted, all-encompassing definition. ‘The New Oxford Dictionary of English’ defines the verb ‘collude’ as: ‘Come to a secret understanding, conspire.’”
For Al Hutchinson, therefore:
“There must be sufficient evidence of a conscious and deliberate act or omission, by means of which police officers intended to assist offenders either in the commission of a crime or in evading detection or apprehension.”
So what amounts to “sufficient evidence”?
The fact that the weapons used were brought into Ireland by British agent Brian Nelson?
The fact that the car used in the attack was provided by an agent codenamed ‘The Mechanic’, operating within the UVF’s Mount Vernon unit in north Belfast?
The Mechanic is a close associate of Mark Haddock, whose Mount Vernon gang was the subject of Nuala O’Loan’s Ballast Report published in 2007.
The Mechanic, whose identity was later revealed to be Terry Fairfield, maintains he passed on all the details of who was involved in the attack to his RUC Special Branch handler.
Coupled with the destruction of forensic exhibits and the failure to carry out DNA tests on up to 177 exhibits, it is hard to understand how the Ombudsman can deny there was collusion in the Loughinisland killings.
It has also emerged that The Mechanic/Fairfield - and the assault rifle used in the Loughinisland killings - was linked to the 1993 killing of West Belfast painter Joseph Reynolds.
Despite this, the Ombudsman is sticking to his claim that he could find no evidence of the role of informers in the Loughinisland attack, nor has he disclosed whether or not he questioned Fairfield’s handlers or clarified Special Branch’s relationship with the UVF murder gang.
It is around the relationship between the Ombudsman’s office and the PSNI’s Intelligence Branch (C3) that the CAJ sees the real issue of the Ombudsman’s ability to carry out truly independent investigations.
According to the CAJ:
“Most, if not all, historic material is provided by the PSNI Intelligence Branch (C3). It is unclear how many former Special Branch officers are located throughout the specialist Crime Operations.
“All of this is relevant to the work of [the Ombudsman] on historic cases since it means that the Ombudsman’s office is reliant on intelligence efforts undertaken by former RUC (and Special Branch) officers . . . many of the most serious allegations of human rights abuses may involve allegations of improper RUC/Special Branch behaviour.”
Therefore, if former Special Branch operatives are gatekeepers, then they control what information comes into the public domain.
The difficulty for the British is that the issue of collusion goes to the heart of their military, intelligence and political campaign in Ireland.
The strategies they employed and the methods they used in conjunction with their operational control over loyalist gun gangs exposes their willingness to murder citizens to assert their political control of Ireland.
What is more problematic for the British is the fact that the families of those killed as a result of this collusion are now fighting back.
The Loughinisland families and the McGurk’s bombing families are examples of that fight.